Recently, the public has become increasingly concerned with disease and its transmission, and as such, there is an increased awareness of the importance of cleansing and hygiene in general. For example, with respect to the transmission of E. coli in the food services industry, the rhinovirus in elementary schools, and nosocomial diseases within healthcare facilities, numerous studies have cited hand hygiene as an effective measure to guard against disease transmission. Moreover, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has set forth that hand washing and sanitizing is the single most important factor in the prevention of disease and the spread of infection. In response, the health care industry, the food services industry, and the hotel and travel industries have been forced to examine their protocols and procedures to ensure that their personnel are adopting hand cleansing habits that are efficacious in the prevention of disease transmission.
In order to minimize the chance of the transmission of bacteria or viruses by hand washing, full compliance with hand washing hygiene standards must be observed, as the failure of one individual to properly sanitize his or her hands can negate the efforts of others who come in contact with such individual. Thus, to ensure that full compliance occurs, many industries have trained individuals who are charged with overseeing compliance with hygiene standards. Unfortunately, individuals overseeing compliance with hygiene standards typically have other responsibilities, which often interfere with their ability to effectively monitor hygiene compliance. To overcome this, automated systems have been proposed to monitor the usage habits of soap and sanitizer dispensers as an aid in the determination of whether compliance with hygiene protocols is being achieved. However, due to the relatively complex nature of these systems, trained individuals are generally needed to administrate and maintain the systems. Additionally, because individuals responsible for overseeing the operation of the compliance monitoring systems are often subject to high turnover, frequent retraining is necessitated, which requires substantial time and expense.
Thus, current hygiene compliance monitoring systems typically do not offer robust data collection features and are generally too complex to install, administrate, and maintain to be utilized on a large scale in environments where the monitoring and assessment of compliance with hygiene standards is of critical importance and benefit to prevent disease transmission.
Therefore, there is a need for a user-friendly hygiene compliance monitoring system for assessing compliance with predetermined hygiene protocols. In addition, there is a need for a hygiene compliance monitoring system to monitor the use of soap and sanitizer dispensers that collect hygiene usage data in time segments or shift time intervals. Furthermore, there is a need for a hygiene compliance monitoring system that is low-cost and can provide information that is maintained confidentially and for a limited duration. There is also a need for a hygiene compliance system that can provide an award indicator based on the same shift time intervals to which compliance is monitored. There is also a need for a versatile hygiene compliance system and award indicator that allows for different modes and displays to be set by an administrator.